Another day, another warm spring morning and I am feeling really good. It is 8.30 am and I have the whole day ahead of me.

I need to do some housework - cleaning, vacuuming, washing, ironing etc - but I hope to get that finished pretty quickly and then the day is mine. No plans, maybe go for a walk and take some photos or maybe finish up another page.

I completed my "Hands" page yesterday and while it is not perfect and there are a couple of tiny errors and even a couple of things that I wish I had done differently, I am happy with the overall result. The idea came to me as soon as I read Kirsty Wiseman's blog and she announced a competition about using your hand prints to make a layout - something personal to you. I immediately heard the Otis Redding song, "These Arms of Mine" in my head and knew that that was what I wanted to do - just needed to change the words. Ralph was away on business and although I was not lonely, I really missed him already and the words just seemed poignant. And so the layout was formed in my head. It has just taken me a while to get around to it. Rather than painting my hands, I used embossing ink and then red/gold embossing powder, added some swirly lines for my journaling and a few bits of bling. Simple but effective and I like it!

Monday, 23 April 2007

Hey, hey - four posts in three days! I must be careful or this will start to become a habit! (hopefully!)Today was a good day. I got up on time, the trains arrived on time, I arrived at lessons on time, and finished on time. I like days like this. The sun is more or less shining, give or take a few clouds, the air is warm and the scent of blossom and flowers fills the air. Unfortunately, this also sticks in my throat and gives me bad hay fever but I am trying to stay positive so we won't go there.I felt so good about the achievements I have made over the last few weeks as far as my scrapbooking goes that I am really motivated and am going to try to get at least a page done today. I would like to enter a couple of challenges to get me moving as I am feeling rather uninspired by my Heidi Swapp class this month. In fact, I have just downloaded the prompts and done nothing with them.Anyway, I remembered that I had not posted a small mini-album that I had completed about our day on the beach last summer. I got the album in a kit for my birthday from two of my students and thought is was perfect for that fun summer day when the kids just played in the sand and did not care where it all went! Love those Maddie cheeks!

Also realised that I had not uploaded the layouts that I have completed so far for my Heidi Swapp class. For January's layout and discussion, you can see my blog entry here.February is pretty self explanatory. We were to make a black and white collage diagonally across the page which I was quite pleased about as I had not done that before.Then in March, it was a "count our blessings" theme and the stacking letters, small photo labels and transparency accent was on the list. I found that I liked using this smaller size of photos as they still have enough detail but you can fit so many on the page. I was a bit disappointed with my letters because they did not really stand out enough although i had deliberately used the cream and soft blue stamp. But maybe subtle is better.CC always welcome.

Sunday, 22 April 2007

I decided to take the easy way out again this month and follow the Her Space : My Space prompts for daily themes - they are still inspiring and stretch my "vision" quite a lot some days! I am managing to take the photos on time - mostly - but the decision on which one is best and slight editing (just a bit of cropping and lightening mostly) is what is taking my time and preventing me from uploading which is very irritating for me. But I hope that you are patient and stay with me during the delays. As you will see, I have uploaded other things over the last few days so there is plenty to be going on with!

Friday, 20 April 2007

Not only have I completed my Christmas journey but I have also completed a mini-book as part of a new Shimelle class "When I Grow Up".

The class started with a few prompts and thoughts about what we wanted to be when we were younger, or what do we still want to be. What did we think we would be? What did others think we would be. I rang mum up and asked her what I had wanted to be all those years ago and she said that she had no recollection of me wanting to be anything! This became the theme of my thoughts...

Then Shimelle suggested that we made a children's style book out of this thought process written in a simple form. She even suggested we made little paper dolls for our pages with our photo as the head - but this was a little bit too creative for me and it would have taken me SO long to do that, so I just cheated and found photos where I could relatively easily cut out the whole figure. This was so much fun for me as I have never done anything like it before. I used a little Maya Road mini-album that came in my Modern Scrapbooking February kit and delved into my most precious BasicGrey stash (the new Perhaps collection.) Once I had the writing done, it really came together much quicker than I would have thought even though I seem to spend so long just looking at the product and wondering how to put it all together! I kept the embellishments to a minimum because the book had come in its own chipboard box, but even so, it ended up too thick to fit. But that is OK because now I have a box that I can use for something else in the future and my mini-book will be out in the open.

I am as pleased as punch that I got this done as I am the eternal procrastinator! And I am just tickled pink with the result!

... how time flies. Already two weeks since I last updated the blog? Where does the time go? And what have I done with it?

Well, suffice to say, we have been busy bunnies and what with four family birthdays, Easter and loads of work, things have not exactly been as quiet as they could be. But I have been extra busy - not with work though!

I got it into my head that I simply HAD to complete the Christmas journal album from Shimelle's class 2006-7. Of course, I had made it really difficult for myself by deciding that I would do the entries as full 12x12 entries rather than some sort of a mini album or an art journal and although it was loads of work (37 entries in total) I loved doing it because I tried out all sorts of different styles and papers and products! So, no two pages are the same and the colours are all mixed up but I think it is really nice for a change. I have to admit that quite a lot of the pages are styled directly after Shimelle's but I definitely think that i have learned some of what I like and what i do not like. For example, I am not so keen when the page takes a gazillion different products and takes hours to make - I sort of lose interest. And I still have to master the whole stamping thing - I started doing a bit but then it all seemed a bit of a faff!

I will load a few of my favourite pages here or the whole album will be available on the right. Just click to load the album and then chose slide show to get them full screen and clear.

First off, here is the pile of finished pages - cool or what? I get pleasure from just looking at them and thinking to myself, "I did that."